Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Despite having a couple of chronic illnesses, I don’t use disease management tools and apps, even though I’m about as digital health-friendly as anyone you can imagine. So I guess the results of the new survey, suggesting that I’m not alone, shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The study was conducted by HealthMine, which recently surveyed 500 insured consumers to find out whether they used digital health devices and apps. Researchers found that while 59% of respondents suffer from chronic conditions, only 7% of these individuals used a disease management tool.

This was the case despite the fact that 50% reported using fitness/activity trackers or apps, and that 52% of respondents were enrolled in a wellness program. Not only that, two thirds of those involved in a wellness program said their program offered incentives for using digital health tools.

Disease management tools may not be in wide use, but that doesn’t mean that the consumers weren’t prepared to give digital health a try. When they drilled down further, HealthMine researchers learned that in addition to the half of respondents that used fitness trackers, consumers were interested in a wide variety of digital health options. For example, 46% used food/nutrition apps, 39% used weight loss apps, 38% used wearable activity tracker apps, 30% used heart rate apps, 28% used pharmacy apps, and 22% used patient portals or sleep apps.

To get consumers interested in disease management tools, it might help to know what motivates them to pick up any digital health app for their use. The biggest motivators cited were desire to know their numbers (42%), followed by improving their health (26%), the knowledge that someone on the other side of the app is tracking results (19%), and incentives for using the app (10%). (It’s worth noting that while incentives weren’t the biggest motivator to use digital health tools, 91% of respondents said that incentives would motivate them to use digital health tools more often.)

All that being said, I think I know what’s wrong here. In my experience, the apps consumers reported using are directed at helping consumers handle problems which, though complex, can be addressed in part by measuring a few key indicators. For example, achieving fitness is a broad and multifactorial goal, but counting steps is simple to do and simple to grasp. Or take food/dieting apps: eating properly can be a life’s work, but drawing on a database to dig out carb counts isn’t such a big deal.

On the other hand, managing a chronic illness may call for data capture, interaction with existing databases, monitoring by a skilled outside party and expert guidance. Pulling all of these together into a usable experience that consumers find helpful — much less one that actually transforms their health — is far more difficult than, say, tracking calories in and calories burned.

I’d argue that truly effective disease management tools, which consumers would truly find useful, calls for institutional commitment by vendors or providers that neither is ready to supply. But if disease management tools came with a particularly intuitive interface, a link to live providers and perhaps more importantly, education as to why the items being tracked matter, we might get somewhere.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

To date, I’d argue, clinicians have been divided as to how useful medical statistics are when they come straight from the patient. In fact, some physicians just don’t see the benefit of amateur readings. (For example, when I brought my own cardiologist three months of dutifully-logged blood pressure and pulse readings, she told me not to bother.)

Research suggests that my experience isn’t unique. One study, released mid-last year by market research firm MedPanel, found that only 15% of physicians were recommending wearables or health apps to patients as tools for growing healthier.

But a new study has found that patients side with health-tracking fans. According to a new study released by the Society for Participatory Medicine, 84% of respondents felt that sharing self-tracking stats such as blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate and physical activity with their clinician would help them better manage their health. And 77% of respondents said that such stats were equally important to both themselves and their healthcare professional.

And growing numbers of healthcare professionals are getting on board. A separate study released last year by Research Now found that 86% of 500 medical professionals said mHealth apps gave them a clearer understanding of a patient’s medical condition, and 76% percent felt that apps were helping patients manage chronic illnesses.

* 76% of adults surveyed would use a clinically-accurate and easy-to-use personal monitoring device
* 57% of respondents would like to both use such a device and share the data generated with a professional
* 81% would be more likely to use a consumer health monitoring device if their healthcare professional recommended such a device

Realistically, medical pros aren’t likely to make robust use of patient-generated data unless that data can be integrated into a patient’s chart quickly and efficiently. Some brave clinicians may actually attempt to skim and mentally integrate data from a health app or wearable, but few have the time, others doubt the data’s accuracy and yet another subgroup simply finds the process too awkward to endure.

The bottom line, ultimately, seems to be that patient-generated data won’t find much favor until hospitals and medical practices roll out technologies like Apple’s HealthKit, which pull the data directly into an EMR and present it in a clinician-friendly manner. And some medical pros won’t even be satisfied with a good presentation; they’ll only take the data seriously if it was served up by an FDA-approved device.

Still, I personally love the idea of participatory medicine, and am happy to learn that health trackers and apps might help us get closer to this approach. As I see it, there’s no downside to having the patient and the clinician understand each other better.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

As most readers know, health IT’s biggest annual event is just around the corner, and the interwebz are heating up with discussions about what #HIMSS16 will bring. The show, which will take place in Las Vegas from February 29 to March 4, offers a ludicrously rich opportunity to learn about new HIT developments — and to mingle with more than 40,000 of the industry’s best and brightest (You may want to check out the session Healthcare Scene is taking part in and the New Media Meetup).

While you can learn virtually anything healthcare IT related at HIMSS, it helps to have an idea of what you want to take away from the big event. In that spirit, I’d like to offer some questions that I plan to ask, as follows:

How do you plan to support the shift to value-based healthcare over the next 12 months? The move to value-based payment is inevitable now, be it via ACOs or Medicare incentive programs under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act. But succeeding with value-based payment is no easy task. And one of the biggest challenges is building a health IT infrastructure that supports data use to manage the cost of care. So how do health systems and practices plan to meet this technical challenge, and what vendor solutions are they considering? And how do key vendors — especially those providing widely-used EMRs — expect to help?

What factors are you considering when you upgrade your EMR? Signs increasingly suggest that this may be the year of the forklift upgrade for many hospitals and health systems. Those that have already invested in massiveware EMRs like Cerner and Epic may be set, but others are ripping out their existing systems (notably McKesson). While in previous years the obvious blue-chip choice was Epic, it seems that some health systems are going with other big-iron vendors based on factors like usability and lower long-term cost of ownership. So, given these trends, how are health systems’ HIT buying decisions shaping up this year, and why?

How much progress can we realistically expect to make with leveraging population health technology over the next 12 months? I’m sure that when I travel the exhibit hall at HIMSS16, vendor banners will be peppered with references to their population health tools. In the past, when I’ve asked concrete questions about how they could actually impact population health management, vendor reps got vague quickly. Health system leaders, for their part, generally admit that PHM is still more a goal than a concrete plan. My question: Is there likely to be any measurable progress in leveraging population health tech this year? If so, what can be done, and how will it help?

How much impact will mobile health have on health organizations this year? Mobile health is at a fascinating moment in its evolution. Most health systems are experimenting with rolling out their own apps, and some are working to integrate those apps with their enterprise infrastructure. But to date, it seems that few (if any) mobile health efforts have made a real impact on key areas like management of chronic conditions, wellness promotion and clinical quality improvement. Will 2016 be the year mobile health begins to deliver large-scale, tangible health results? If so, what do vendors and health leaders see as the most promising mHealth models?

Of course, these questions reflect my interests and prejudices. What are some of the questions that you hope to answer when you go to Vegas?

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source, software engineering, and health IT, but his editorial output has ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. His articles have appeared often on EMR & EHR and other blogs in the health IT space.
Andy also writes often for O'Reilly's Radar site (http://oreilly.com/) and other publications on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, and DebConf.

The promise of device data pervades the health care field. It’s intrinsic to patient-centered medical homes, it beckons clinicians who are enamored with hopes for patient engagement, and it causes data analysts in health care to salivate. This promise also drives the data aggregation services offered by Validic and just recently, the Shimmer integration tool from Open mHealth. But according to David Haddad, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Open mHealth, devices resist attempts to yield up their data to programmers and automated tools.

Every device manufacturer has its own idiosyncratic way of handling data, focused on the particular uses for its own device. According to Haddad, for instance, different manufacturers provide completely different representations for the same data, leave out information like time zones and units, and can provide information as granular as once per second or as vague as once per day.. Even something as basic as secure connectivity is unstandardized. Although most vendors use the OAuth protocol that is widespread on the Web, many alter it in arbitrary ways. This puts barriers in the way of connecting to their APIs.

Validic and Shimmer have to overcome these hurdles one by one, vendor by vendor. The situation is just like the burdens facing applications that work with electronic health records. Haddad reports that the cacophony of standards among device vendors seems to come from lack of attention to the API side of their product, not deliberate obstructionism. With all the things device manufacturers have to worry about–the weight, feel, and attractiveness of the object itself, deals with payers and retailers offering the product, user interface issues, etc.–the API always seems to be an afterthought. (Apple may be an exception.)

So when Shimmer contacts the tool makers at these vendors, most respond and take suggestions in a positive manner. But they may have just one or two programmers working on the API, so progress is slow. It comes down to the old problem in health care: even with government emphasis on data sharing, there is still no strong advocate for interoperability in the field.

Why did Open mHealth take on this snake’s nest and develop Shimmer? Haddad says they figured that the advantages of open source–low cost of adoption and the ease of adding extensions–will open up new possibilities for app developers, clinical settings, and researchers. Most sites are unsure what to do with device data and are just starting to experiment with it. Being able to develop a prototype they can throw away later will foster innovation. Open mHealth has produced a detailed cost analysis in an appeal to researchers and clinicians to give Shimmer a try.

Shimmer, like the rest of the Open mHealth tools, rests on their own schemas for health data. The schemas in themselves can’t revolutionize health care. Every programmer maintains a healthy cynicism about schemas, harking back to xkcd’s cartoon about “one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.” But this schema took a broader view than most programs in health care, based on design principles that try to balance simplicity against usefulness and specificity. Of course, every attempt to maintain a balance comes up against complaints the the choices were too complex for some users, too simple for others. The true effects of Open mHealth appear as it is put to use–and that’s where open source tools and community efforts really can make a difference in health care. The schemas are showing value through their community adoption: they are already used by many sites, including some major commercial users, prestigious research sites, and start-ups.

A Pulse app translates between HL7 and the Open mHealth schema. This brings Open mHealth tools within easy reach of EHR vendors trying to support extensions, or users of the EHRs who consume their HL7-formatted data.

The Granola library translates between Apple’s HealthKit and JSON. Built on this library, the hipbone app takes data from an iPhone and puts it in JSON format into a Dropbox file. This makes it easier for researchers to play with HealthKit data.

In short, the walls separating medicine must be beaten down app by app, project by project. As researchers and clinicians release open source tools that tie different systems together, a bridge between products will emerge. Haddad hopes that more widespread adoption of the Open mHealth schema and Shimmer will increase pressure on device vendors to produce standardized data accessible to all.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

For 20 years, I’ve been writing about clinical data management, analytics and what has now come to be known as Big Data. Like everyone else who follows this sector, I’ve been exposed to many examples of brilliant thinking about leveraging health data, and of late, a growing number of examples where data analytics has improved care and saved lives.

I’ve also reported on dozens of notable case studies in which combing EMRs for telltale signs of disease has resulted in finding dangerous or even life-threatening conditions, including heart disease, diabetes and to a more limited degree cancer. What’s even more remarkable is that we’re likely to see the list of conditions detectable by data analytics expand greatly, particularly if we make smart use of the growing flood of mobile health data.

The problem is, we’re still extremely far from achieving universal health data interoperability, and no amount of inspiring speeches by HIT thought leaders or Congressional bellyachers will achieve this goal on their own. We need a shift comparable to cultural transformation that fueled the astonishing progress of our space efforts. (Maybe someone should claim that the Russians are ahead of us in the interoperability race — we can’t let them Russkys achieve national health data interoperability before we do, durn it!)

And none of this will help me get the last few years of my life back.

You see, while the diagnosis hasn’t been all-out finalized, it appears that I have a case of early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. I won’t bore any clinicians with a detailed description of the illness, but suffice it to say that it’s neurological in origin, potentially disabling and at present, uncurable and unstoppable. I can probably still live a good life, particularly if I respond well to standard drugs, but all told, this thing is a major buzz kill.

I’ve had signs and symptoms that fit the diagnosis for at least a couple of years, and I dutifully reported them to the caregivers I saw. That included several encounters with doctors associated with the large, high-quality health system which serves the region where I live. The health system providers entered the symptoms into their jet-fueled Epic EMR, but it seems that despite that, they never put two and two together. (And as is still the norm, the data gathered at PCP visits has been in no way connected to the data living in the hospital Epic system.)

Fortunately, picking up on the earlier signs of Parkinson’s — if that is indeed my condition — wouldn’t have done anything to slow the progression of the illness. (If I had a malignant cancer, of course, this would be a different story.) But heaven knows I would have had the clarity I needed to make good self-care choices.

For example, I could have seen physical therapists to help with growing muscle weakness, occupational therapists to help me adjust my work style, joined patient groups to gather support and volunteered for clinical trials. (I live in the DC metro, not too far from NIH, so that may well have been an option.) And most importantly, as I see it, I wouldn’t have had to live with the vague but growing dread that something was Just Not Right for years.

Because I’m not a clinician, I’ll never know how likely it is that I could have been diagnosed earlier if all my caregivers had all of my health data. But I’m confident that interoperability and the accumulation of population data will help with earlier diagnosis and treatment of many unpleasant, disabling or even fatal conditions.

So when you go about the business of improving data analytics tools and interoperability, mining population health databases for trends and leveraging mHealth to improve chronic disease management, I invite you to think of me — not a tragic figure by any means, but someone who’s counting on you to keep connecting the dots. Never doubt that the human value of what you do is extraordinary, but never forget that real people are waiting in the wings for you to supply insights that can give them their life back.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Here’s the news EMR proponents have been insisting would emerge someday, justifying their long-suffering faith in the value of such systems. A new study from Juniper Research has concluded that EMRs will save $78 billion cumulatively across the globe over the next five years, largely by connecting digital health technologies together.

While I’m tempted to get cynical about this — my poor heart has been broken by so many unsupportable or conflicting claims regarding EMR savings over the years — I think the study definitely bears examination. If digital health technologies like smart watches, fitness trackers, sensor-laden clothing, smart mobile health apps, remote monitoring and telemedicine share a common backbone that serves clinicians, the study’s conclusions look reasonable on first glance.

According to Juniper, the growth of ACOs is pushing providers to think on a population health level and that, in turn, is propelling them to adopt digital health tech. And it’s not just top healthcare leaders that are getting excited about digital health. Juniper found that over the last 18 months, healthcare workers have become significantly more engaged in digital healthcare.

But how will providers come to grips with the floods of data generated by these emerging technologies? Why, EMRs will do the job. “Advanced EHRs will provide the ‘glue’ to bring together the devices, stakeholders and medical records in the future connected healthcare environment,” according to Juniper report author Anthony Cox.

But it’s important to note that at present, EMRs aren’t likely to have the capacity sort out the growing flood of connected health data on their own. Instead, it appears that healthcare providers will have to rely on data intermediary platforms like Apple’s HealthKit, Samsung’s SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions) and Microsoft Health. In reality, it’s platforms like these, not EMRs, that are truly serving as the glue for far-flung digital health data.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that on reflection, my cynical take on the study is somewhat justified. While they’ll play a very important role, I believe that it’s disingenuous to suggest that EMRs themselves will create huge healthcare savings.

Sure, EMRs are ultimately where the buck stops, and unless digital health data can be consumed by doctors at an EMR console, they’re unlikely to use it. But even though using EMRs as the backbone for digital health collection and population health management sounds peachy, the truth is that EMR vendors are nowhere near ready to offer robust support for these efforts.

Yes, I believe that the combination of EMRs and digital health data will prove to be very powerful over time. And I also believe that platforms like HealthKit will help us get there. I even believe that the huge savings projected by Juniper is possible. I just think getting there will be a lot more awkward than the study makes it sound.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Generally speaking, cutting back on IT projects and spending is a tricky thing. In some cases spending can be postponed, but other times, slicing a budget can have serious consequences.

One area where cutting budgets can cause major problems is in preparing to roll out EMRs, especially cuts to training, which can lead to problems with rollouts, resentment, medical mistakes, system downtime due to mistakes and more. Also, skimping on training can lead to a domino effect which results in the exit of CEOs and other senior leaders, which has happened several times (that we know of) over the past couple of years.

That being said, sometimes budgetary constraints force CIOs to make cuts anyway, reports FierceHealthIT. Increasingly projects other than EMRs are falling in priority.

A recent survey of hospital technology leaders representing 650 hospitals nationwide published by HIMSS underscores this trend. Respondents told HIMSS said that despite increases in IT budgets, they still struggled to complete IT projects due to financial limitations. In fact, 25 percent said that financial survival was their top priority.

What that comes down to, it seems, is that promising initiatives fall by the roadside if they don’t contribute to EMR success. For example, providers are stepping back from HIE participation because they feel they can’t afford to be involved, according to a HIMSS Analytics survey published last fall.

Instead, hospitals are taking steps to enhance and build on their EMR investment. For example, as FierceHealthIT notes, Partners HealthCare recently chose to pull together all of its EMR efforts under a single vendor. In the past, Partners had used a combo of homegrown systems and vendor products, but IT leaders there felt that this arrangement was too expensive to continue, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.

This laser focus on EMRs may be necessary at present, as the EMR is arguably the most mission-critical software hospitals have in place at the moment. The question, as I see it, is whether this will cripple hospitals in the future. Eventually, I’d argue, mobile health will become a priority for hospitals and medical practices, as will some form of HIE participation, just to name the first two technologies that come to mind. In three to five years, if they don’t fund initiatives in these areas, hospitals may look up and find that they’re hopelessly behind .

Dr. West is an endocrinologist in private practice in Washington, DC. He completed fellowship training in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. West opened The Washington Endocrine Clinic, PLLC in 2009. He can be contacted at doctorwestindc@gmail.com.

One of the things I would like to get back in the habit of in the new year is to contribute more again to this blog, which I started in 2009 with help from John Lynn at Healthcarescene.com. Part of the challenge of keeping an ongoing stream of thoughts here has been both my busy life as an active provider of subspecialty healthcare, the growth of my practice as a business, and most importantly the emergence of new ideas for consideration and writing.

Luckily, I have been able to find some novel sources recently, and so I am going to try to reach out to these resources more often to gain insight and ideas for new and interesting topics on which to blog.

One of these sources recently highlighted an interview with Lygeia Ricciardi, the ONC Director of Consumer eHealth. The ONC is under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services. Ms. Ricciardi recently attended the FCC’s mHealth Innovation Expo in Washington, DC, on 12/6/13. She highlighted work on policies for mobile health apps and cited a goal of helping to reach everyday people and empower them to improve their ability to participate in their own healthcare.

M-health apps are currently under voluntary control in whether or not their developers follow ONC guideines for design. Such apps may help patients, who are now often referred to as “consumers”, in such tasks as shopping for good-quality healthy food and reading nutrition labels. In 2014, the ONC Office of Consumer e-Health plans to launch a website for helping patients find where to gain access to their own health data online. Such information can include medication lists, laboratory reports, and other records. Ms. Ricciardi likens this initiative to the “Blue Button” project that targets making medical data available to veterans at VA hospitals.

Access remains a key concern since once patient data is downloaded through a third-party app, such data will then by definition not be protected under HIPAA. A third-party app developer will automatically gain access to this data during the process.

Ms. Ricciardi also cited possible other uses for mHealth apps, including helping people make participating in the healthcare both fun and interactive. Examples were provided of apps that can help patients play games to compete against each other to see who can follow healthy habits better, e.g. who can exercise more, check blood pressure more, lose more weight, and check their blood sugars more often (for diabetic patients). She further stated that consumers are being brought into the ONC process for m-health app policy development on a regular basis to ensure that there is some public guidance for what is and is not desired. She cited the new paradigm, often quoted by now, that a cultural shift is changing towards more shared decision making in healthcare and giving more power to patients to participate actively in their healthcare rather than being passive bodies directed by healthcare professionals.

She encouraged individual patients/consumers to get more actively involved in their own healthcare. According to Ms. Ricciardi, although the current medical environment is still mostly of two separate worlds, with little sharing of medical information between medical practitioners and patients, the coming world of m-health apps promises much potential for changing this.

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company's social media strategies for Billian's HealthDATA and Porter Research. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs and currently manages social marketing channels for the Health IT Leadership Summit and Technology Association of Georgia’s Health Society. You can find her on Twitter @JennDennard.

Fall conference season is in full swing, and while I didn’t have the opportunity to attend StrataRx or Health 2.0, I was able to follow along via very active tweet streams. I have had the opportunity to attend several regional events, and have several more lined up in the coming weeks. Here is a brief list of those, along with reflections and expectations.

mHealth: Engaging the Masses and Making It Work for Your Bottom Line
This evening event, put on by the Technology Association of Georgia’s Health Society, featured panelists from Kaiser, Cigna, Intel and Accelarad. The back and forth between the four different stakeholders illuminated a number of challenges healthcare as an industry is facing when it comes to broad adoption and regular utilization of mobile health tools. They all want to fit those tools into a business model that not only helps to improve outcomes, but also generates revenue at the same time. (On a side note, I found it very interesting to learn from the Cigna panelist that Aetna is the payer with the best mobile health tools.)

Georgia HIMSS Trade Faire
This daylong event offered a variety of sessions, keynote speakers and an exhibit hall, all situated in Building C of the sprawling Georgia World Congress Center. My favorite session by far was “Georgia Leads the Way: Patient Engagement in Cancer Care.” Stakeholders from Georgia Tech, Cancer Navigators, and the Georgia Department of Community Health were on hand to explain how the ONC-funded program is helping providers engage their patients as full partners, and to show how those patients can actively participate in managing their cancer through the use of mobile technology. It was encouraging to me to know that programs like this are available to people that live north of metro Atlanta.

My day was topped off by a lovely reception hosted by the Health Forward Alliance at the Metro Atlanta Chamber’s scenic rooftop. The alliance is looking to bring innovative thought leaders to the healthcare community to inspire new ways of thinking. It’s a great idea, as I think sometimes healthcare folks get stuck in their healthcare bubble, rarely exposing themselves to fresh perspectives from different industries.

AHIMA
October 27 – 30 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta
I’m excited that AHIMA is in Atlanta this year. No flight delays or strange smelling hotel rooms for me this year. Being that I do technically live in North Georgia, I’ll unfortunately have quite a commute. In my mind, that is all the more reason to soak up as much of the conference as possible. I haven’t combed through the educational session descriptions yet, but I do know I’m looking forward to hearing on Tuesday about connected health from Travis Good, MD, who writes a terrific blog on the topic; and to the Henry Winkler/Marlee Matlin téte a téte Wednesday morning. I had no idea they had such an inspiring story to tell.

Health IT Leadership Summit
November 12, the Fox Theatre, Atlanta
Full disclosure: I’m part of the marketing committee for this event. Nevertheless, I am excited about hearing from WebMD founder and current Sharecare CEO Jeff Arnold. Sharecare is doing some interesting things in the consumer engagement space, effectively trying to bring it to the masses. I hope Arnold will touch on why he thought the time was right to get such an endeavor started, and how he keeps visitors coming back again and again. That seems to be a main sticking point with most engagement tools I read about these days.

I’d love to know of any events coming up I should make a point to attend, as well as your thoughts on any that I mentioned above.

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company's social media strategies for Billian's HealthDATA and Porter Research. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs and currently manages social marketing channels for the Health IT Leadership Summit and Technology Association of Georgia’s Health Society. You can find her on Twitter @JennDennard.

I had the pleasure of attending a Technology Association of Georgia Health Society event last week on mobile health. It offered me a chance to chat with colleagues, and hear from a panel of payers, providers, startups and vendors on the current state of and predictions for mobile health. While networking beforehand, I found myself trying to succinctly answer a colleague’s question of, “Where do you see the EMR market heading in the next few years?”

My short answer was, “It is consolidating and will continue to consolidate.” I had more details and theories on the tip of my tongue, but didn’t get the chance to back up my statements before we were ushered in to the evening’s presentation. It was a big question – one that I think has only one correct answer, but also one that potentially has a variety of explanations behind that answer. Needless to say, I mulled it over that night and into the next day, when, coincidentally, I awoke to news of the Vitera/Greenway Medical deal.

If I had the chance to do it over again, I’d break my response down like this: Meaningful Use obviously provided incentive for businesses to get into the EMR game. Some were already in healthcare, while others were on the fringes. Combine those new industry entrants with companies that have provided EMRs since before HITECH, and you’re left with a crowded market.

Implementations and go lives coinciding with Stage 1 left many providers dissatisfied with the EMR experience thus far, but still willing to forge ahead. As they look to Stage 2, some realize their vendors – whom many are already disenchanted with – will not be up to the task of helping hospitals meet digital patient engagement quotas, among other Meaningful Use guidelines. And so began the rip and replace movement.

Vendors deemed not up to par looked at their options. Many took a step back and reassessed product development and strategy, deciding to either: get out of the healthcare game, close up shop altogether, merge with a competitor, or make themselves available for possible acquisition.

That’s one wave of consolidation. I’m fairly confident we’ll see another wave in the next 12 to 18 months, if it hasn’t already started. (I don’t think we’ll see too many Phoenix-type situations like Google.) As providers dive deeper into using technologies around Stage 2 engagement requirements, they’ll experience a second wave of acceptance or denial. At some point, the EMR replacement market will die down, providers will settle into the technology they’ve settled on, and purchases of new systems will stagnate. EMR sales will thus dry up a bit, forcing vendors to again look at their options. I would think that many will turn into consulting services once the demand for new software has died down.

Now that I’ve put pen to paper and laid out my thoughts, I wonder what readers predict. I encourage you to let me know whether I’m on the mark, totally off base, or somewhere in between.